Slush Pool Mines the First ASIC Boost Block Sparking More Debate

On March 24, the mining operation Slush Pool announced it had mined a block using the controversial ASIC Boost protocol and did so using a Halong Miner. The news follows the pool revealing it was compatible with ASIC Boost which sparked up a heated debate just recently.

According to a recent announcement over Twitter from the mining operation Slush Pool they have mined a block using ASIC Boost technology. Further, the pool had stated they mined block 514882 using Halong Mining equipment. Halong Mining is also a contentious subject as a lot of skeptics believe the mining company and its devices are fabricated. However, Slush Pool says they got about “16 TH/s” of hashrate using the equipment created by the tendentious company.

According to the available evidence, it was mined by Halong Mining hardware. Congrats to the lucky miner from Guangdong, China.

A Halong Miner. Currently, most of the public is skeptical of this company because machines are not widely available for public review. Some believe Dragon Mint machines are a fabrication. Slush Pool, however, states that block 514882 was mined with a Halong mining device. The mining pool’s leaders denied having any affiliation with Halong when the company first announced launching.

Core Supporter’s Bitmain Hate Continues

After the announcement, the news went viral on social media platforms like Twitter and Reddit forums. Of course, bitcoin core supporters were pleased to hear the news and most seemed to forget about how controversial this technology was just a few months ago. Most of the proponents of core stated that they didn’t appreciate Bitmain using ASIC Boost because they may have been mining with it covertly. Ironically enough being covert no one can prove that anyone had used the protocol back then and it has never been proven that Bitmain used the technology. In many respects, core supporters were thrilled to see another operation be competitive towards Bitmain.

Not sure what you mean — One of the reasons the anti-Bitmain sentiment grew so large was because of AsicBoost itself — Are you happy that there’s competition in the ASIC Boost space? Or just the mining space, even though the competitor is also implementing ASIC Boost?

Even though it was never proven that Bitmain used ASIC Boost covertly, many core supporters still believe Bitmain is their enemy.

The Community Now Waits to See if This Technology Affects the Mining Space

On the other side of the hand, bitcoin cash (BCH) supporters thought the excitement from core proponents was extremely contradictory from when most of them called ASIC Boost and “attack or an exploit.” A lot of hateful words and malice was directed at Bitmain during the time even a core supporter from Israel vandalized the Bitmain offices located in the region. One bitcoin cash supporter writes after Slush’s announcement, “ASIC Boost is good but not Jihan ASIC Boost.” Still, the argument is combated by the ‘covert’ part of the discussion, where many core supporters believe the technology is evil when used secretly. Moreover, fans of Slush using ASIC Boost also stated that covert ASIC Boost was incompatible with Segregated Witness (Segwit) which created another topical scaling discussion at the time. But again BCH proponents were very skeptical of the announcement and think the current actions are hypocritical.

No one quite knows exactly what the use of ASIC Boost will bring to the global arena of mining competition. ASIC Boost is a method of optimization that makes mining operations more efficient by 20-30 percent according to estimates.

What do you think about Slush mining the first ASIC Boost block on BTC mainnet? Do you think the action is hypocritical or do you think its ok to use the technology non-secretively? Let us know your thoughts on this subject in the comments below.

Last November the Bitcoin Cash (BCH) community witnessed a hash war that resulted in a bifurcation of the main chain.… read more.

Jamie Redman

Jamie Redman is a financial tech journalist living in Florida. Redman has been an active member of the cryptocurrency community since 2011. He has a passion for Bitcoin, open source code, and decentralized applications. Redman has written thousands of articles for news.Bitcoin.com about the disruptive protocols emerging today.

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